The Holocaust and the Modernization of Gender: A ...€¦ · otherwise identified, are to women of the elite, or "German" ethni2 c group. 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity Holocaust and

The Holocaust and theModernization of Gender:A Historiographical Essay

Ann Taylor Allen

ZY G M U N T Bauman's book, Modernity and the Holocaust, argues thatthe Holocaust was not an aberration from modernity, but ratherthe most extreme symptom of a distinctively modern pathology.1

Women are conspicuously absent from this indictment of modernity; Bauman,a sociologist, mentions neither gender as an issue nor women as individu-als. This gap in Bauman's text is in fact full of meaning, for the absenceof women as persons does not preclude the hidden presence of gender asa category of analysis. I shall use the absence and presence of gender inBauman's text as a starting point for an examination of the historiographyof women and gender and its relevance for our understanding of theHolocaust. First, I will tease out the hidden, gendered implications ofBauman's theory; second, I will look at the ways in •which recent femi-nist scholarship has approached the question of women's responsibility forthe Holocaust. Finally, I shall suggest that a consideration of the culturalconstruction of gender, as explored by recent scholarship in many fields,is necessary to our understanding of the historical and ethical concernsthat Bauman and others have raised. I will bracket the important questionof whether considerations of instrumental rationality were, as Baumanimplies, the chief or exclusive justification for Nazi decision-making; forBauman's emphasis on the bureaucratic mentality, even if one-sided, cer-tainly points up an aspect of the Holocaust which sets it apart from theother great massacres of history. This essay concerns chiefly women's rolesas perpetrators or bystanders. Thus references to "women," when nototherwise identified, are to women of the elite, or "German" ethnic group.2

1. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: 1989).2. "German" is placed in quotation marks because it denotes the category defined by

the National Socialists, who placed Jewish and other women of minority groups outsidethe national community. Of course, many of the women so excluded were, in fact, Ger-man citizens.

Central European History, vol. 30, no. 3, 1997, 349-364

349

Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.39.106.173, on 16 Feb 2021 at 14:58:56, subject to the

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473

https://www.cambridge.org/core

350 THE HOLOCAUST & THE MODERNIZATION OF GENDER

This argument will employ a broad definition of "gender" that assumesthat the differences between men and woman are primarily based not onbiology, but on cultural construction. Such constructions of gender, alongwith other forms of difference—such as class, racial, religious, or nationaldifferences—shape our ways of thinking about human relationships, thoughoften in unacknowledged ways. Conceptions of gender difference are in-tegral to the organization of power, whether enacted through legislationand precept or symbolically represented through ideology.3

In order to understand the gendered implications of Bauman's theory,it is necessary to place it in the context of the sociological and historio-graphical tradition to which it belongs. Bauman's argument is by no meansnew, but was originated by the Frankfurt School during the 1930s and1940s on a theoretical basis created by Max Weber. Although Baumancriticizes the Frankfurt School for emphasizing psychological rather thansociological causation, in fact his view of the relationship of modernity tototalitarianism in many ways resembles theirs.4 The Frankfurt School, andparticularly its most prominent exponents, Theodor Adorno and MaxHorkheimer, traced the sickness of modernity to a split in Enlightenmentthinking between normative (or what Max Weber called "value") rationality,oriented toward the intrinsic value of ends, and instrumental rationality,directed toward objective and value-free efficiency in the realization ofends but incapable of normative judgment. In their collective work, Dialecticof Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer characterize the tradition of"critical reason" (a recasting of Weber's "value rationality") as the mostprecious heritage of the Enlightenment and its submergence by a calcu-lating and morally neutral instrumental rationality as the precondition forthe entire failure of Western intellectual traditions to offer a basis foreffective resistance to fascism.5 For Bauman, the Holocaust shows the ultimateconsequences of a "culture of instrumental rationality" which combinedenormous efficiency in the contrivance of technological and bureaucraticmeans with a cold indifference to the morality of the ends thus attained.6

In his essay, "Authority and the Family," Horkheimer connects thisfateful split in the Western psyche to the history of gender relations, ashe understood it. He sees one important precondition in the separation(usually traced by historians to the late eighteenth century) of private andpublic spheres: the first identified with the intrinsic value of human indi-

3. Cf. Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Histori-cal Review 91 (December, 1986), reprinted in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Feminism and History(New York 1996), 152-82.

4. Bauman, Modernity, 153.5. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John

Cumming (New York, 1995; original edition New York, 1944), 3—6 and passim.6. Bauman, Modernity, 107-16.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473


ANN TAYLOR ALLEN 351

viduals, loving commitment, and women; the second with the subordinationof persons to impersonal ends, emotional distancing, and men.7 Horkheimerexplains how the hierarchical relationship of these spheres, in which pub-lic concerns •were valued over private concerns (for Hegel, the individualas family member was an "unreal and insubstantial shadow" and only ascitizen "real and substantial") contributed to the prevalence of instrumen-tal thinking in Western culture.8 In the family, and specifically withinwhat he called the "maternal aura"—that is, in the female sphere—Horkheimer perceives a potential locus of normative rationality, where"the individual always had the possibility of living not as a mere functionbut as a human being." Thus in theory the experience of maternal lovecould be the basis for resistance to the "culture of instrumental rationality,"for "in the yearning of many adults for the paradise of their childhood . . .there are ideas and forces at work which . . . in the bourgeois system oflife rarely have any place but the family where they can survive at all."9

Horkheimer's recognition of the connections between gender relationsand politics, especially through the construction of public and privatespheres, was in many ways pioneering. But his conceptual possibilitieswere limited by his evident inability to imagine women as historical actors.Because he does not constitute the mother as a subject, but only as asymbolic figure haunting her adult son's nostalgic "dreams of a bettercondition for mankind,"10 Horkheimer cannot envisage the realization ofthe values which he calls "maternal" in the modern, public world. Infact, he takes a pessimistic view of the future, which he believes can onlybring the further disempowerment of the nurturing mother by the au-thority of the father and of the state. Horkheimer's basically Marxist viewof history, which identifies the overthrow of the female power exercisedthrough a prehistoric matriarchy (in the words of Engels, "the world-historical defeat of the female sex") as the beginning of history, acknowl-edges no possibility of women's exercising public power in historic time.11

Women, while they remain in the female sphere, are thus endowed withinnocence of the crimes of the modern state, but at the price of beingplaced outside modernity, and indeed outside of history itself.

7. Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans.Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York, 1972), 116-28.

8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 2 vols., translated and with an introductionby J. B. Baillie (London, 1910), 2:445.

9. Horkheimer, "Authority," 114. I am greatly indebted to Mechthild Roimpf, "Mysti-cal Aura: Imagination and Reality of the 'Maternal' in Horkheimer's Writings," in OnMax Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole(Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 309-34.

10. Ibid., 114.11. Ibid., 118.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



Like Horkheimer, Bauman places the development of the "culture ofinstrumental rationality" in the context of the history of Western civiliza-tion. His first chapters discuss many aspects of this history, including rac-ism, anti-Semitism, and the rise of scientific thinking, but make no mentionof gender relations among these causative factors. This negligence is allthe more striking in view of the year of the book's publication, 1989,when a substantial body of contemporary historical and sociological lit-erature on the development of the gendered division of labor and of therelationship of public to private spheres existed.12

Bauman confronts the same problem as Horkheimer: given that West-ern culture is, as he contends, totally pervaded by the spirit of instrumen-tal rationality, where is the locus of normative rationality from which thisculture may be judged? In place of Horkheimer's theory of the "maternalaura," Bauman cites the highly abstract, complex, and poetic vision ofthe philosopher Emanuel Levinas, whose ideas have inspired muchpostmodern ethical and philosophical inquiry. Starting in the 1960s, Levinascriticized the Western tradition of ontology (especially as developed byHeidegger) for its subsumption of all beings under universalizing catego-ries, thus denying the uniqueness of the human individual. Such philo-sophical systems, Levinas charged, justified the sacrifice of the individualto aims claiming universal validity, such as those of a movement or state—a clear reference to the recent history both of the Nazi and the Stalinistregimes. As an alternative to such destructive uses of reason, Levinas as-serted that ontology must yield its primacy in Western philosophy toethics. The new ethical consciousness must affirm the transcendent valueof the human individual through face-to-face confrontation and absoluteresponsibility. Such responsibility, which cannot be defined or limited byabstract definitions of individual rights, destabilizes the autonomy of theego—traditionally among the highest values of modern Western ethics—by denying the separateness of the self from the other. "The absolutelyOther is the human Other. And the putting into question of the Same bythe Other is a summons to respond. The I is not simply conscious of thisnecessity to respond . . . rather the I is, by its very position, responsibilitythrough and through."13

12. For example: Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der Geschlechtscharaktere—EineSpiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben," in Soziaigeschichte der Familiein der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1976), 363—93; Seyla Benhabib andDrucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, 1987). The latter collection con-tains responses to critical theory by a group of feminist sociologists, philosophers, andpolitical theorists, some of whom are widely published elsewhere.

13. Emmanuel Levinas, "Transcendence and Height," in Emmanuel Levinas: Bask Philo-sophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi(Bloomington, Indiana, 1996), 17.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



Bauman takes Levinas's ethic of absolute responsibility as the basis ofnormative rationality, but as a social scientist is faced with the question:in what cultural or social space could such an alternative ethic develop?Whereas Horkheimer identifies that space as the family, specifically as thematernal sphere, Bauman identifies it only through cryptic and largelyunexplained references to a "primordial," "primeval," or "presocial" ex-perience of "being with others." "Responsibility being the existential modeof the human subject," he explains, "morality is the primary structure ofthe intersubjective relation in its most pristine form. . . . The substance ofmorality being a duty towards the other (as distinct from an obligation)and a duty which precedes all interestedness—the roots of morality reachwell beneath societal arrangements, like structures of domination or cul-ture."14 Because Bauman completely overlooks the history of gender re-lationships, he fails to acknowledge the culturally-constructed associationof the sphere of the private, particular, and intimate with women and thefamily.15 For the human individual, moreover, the original (that is, "primor-dial" or "primal" or "presocial") experience of unconditional love, proximity,and responsibility occurs in this female-identified sphere, through the mother-child relationship.16

Despite Bauman's gender-neutral language, his view of ethics and his-tory, I would submit, is gendered in much the same way as Horkheimer's.In fact, by identifying the starting-point of his inquiry as his wish tounderstand the life experiences of his wife, Janina, a Holocaust survivor,Bauman symbolically locates the origin of his own ethical insights in thefemale and familial sphere.17 Both Bauman and Horkheimer in effect identifythe realm of normative rationality with values stereotyped by Westernculture as female or motherly. And both place this "female" realm out-side of history, in a disempowered private sphere or in a primitive layerof the psyche that is not yet integrated into adult consciousness.

The same unacknowledged association of the realm of normative reasonwith women and with maternal influence is curiously prevalent in recent

14. Bauman, Modernity, 183.15. Cf. Joan B. Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsidera-

tion," in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan(New York, 1993), 91-116.

16. Cf. Axel Honneth, "The Other of Justice: Habermas and the Ethical Challenge ofPostmodernism," in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cam-bridge, 1995), 289-324. "Genetically speaking, however, the experience of this moral principleprecedes the encounter with all other moral points of view because . . . it stands at thebeginning of the child's developmental process. Indeed, it may be the case that a sensoriumfor what can be called, in an unrestricted sense, equal treatment can only be developed inthe first place if one's own person has had the experience of unlimited care at some time"(p. 318).

17. Bauman, Modernity, vii.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



studies of the Holocaust. Although Christopher Browning and DanielGoldhagen never mention gender as an issue, they in fact give it a ratherimportant role in their interpretations of the crimes of Police Battalion101. Readers of both authors' books will remember that an officer of thebattalion, the newlywed Captain Julius Wohlauf, brings his pregnant youngwife Vera to Poland, where she observes a ghetto clearing. The verydifferent images of Frau Wohlauf given by the two historians suggest thatthey see her chiefly as a symbolic figure representing the men's moralvalues, as each interprets them. Browning, who believes that at least someof the men had moral and emotional objections to their grisly task, pic-tures her as a "good woman," "clearly visible in her dress on the market-place, watching the events at close range."18 Goldhagen, who asserts thatthe men sadistically enjoyed their work, shows her as a "bad woman,"equipped with the instruments of sadism: "Frau Wohlauf. . . probablycarried that symbol of domination, a riding crop."19 Both historians notethat Wohlaufs comrades were outraged at Vera's presence, and thoughtit very inappropriate. Browning interprets this objection as evidence thatthe men "could still feel shame." Goldhagen, on the contrary, arguesthat the men did not, in fact, feel shame and adduces as evidence the factthat there were other female observers to whom the men did not object.Both of these accounts are based on the assumption that women (pre-sumably of the privileged ethnic group) are respected by men as bearersof maternal authority, capable of inspiring shame; failure to feel shame inthe presence of such women thus indicates utter shamelessness. In bothaccounts, Frau Wohlauf functions more as a symbolic figure onto whommale guilt and nostalgia (or, in the words of Klaus Theweleit "Manner-phantasien"20) are projected than as a historical actor herself, for neitherhistorian extends his central concern with the motivation and responsibil-ity of the men to this female participant.

Therefore the task of feminist scholarship has been to restore womento history by presenting them not as symbols but as subjects who, despitetheir disadvantaged status, made choices and bore moral responsibility.An important question in this historical inquiry must be the relation-ship of women to what Bauman and Horkheimer have called the cultureof instrumental rationality. Did the Nazi regime place women of the dominantethnic group in a separate sphere, identified with a traditional, even

18. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solu-tion in Poland (New York, 1993), 93.

19. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holo-caust (New York, 1996), 242.

20. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. StephenConway (Minneapolis, 1987).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



"reactionary" domestic ideology and isolated from the male-dominatedpublic world? Or did Nazi policies actually encourage the erosion ofpublic-private boundaries, so that women participated more fully in thepublic sphere? And what do both hypotheses imply for the centralquestion—the responsibility of women as perpetrators and bystandersto the Holocaust?

Any analysis of the meaning of modernity to women must distinguishbetween normative and instrumental rationalization. The normative val-ues of feminism, derived directly from the Enlightenment, center on theequality of women with men, meaning their right to equal respect andpower in all aspects of culture and society. The inclusion of women inmale-dominated professional and bureaucratic structures has sometimes beena means toward this end, and modern states, including the National So-cialist state, have often turned feminist aspirations to their own advantageby offering to selected women various vocational and professional oppor-tunities. But this form of modernization need not serve the normativeend of gender equality—in fact, often it further instrumentalizes womenin the service of male authority—and it thus cannot be regarded as afeminist end in itself.

To turn to the now substantial body of feminist historiography on womenunder National Socialism, what can be said about the modernization ofgender and its implications for female responsibility? Among the first his-tories of women under National Socialism were two pioneering works inEnglish, both dating from the 1970s, by Jill Stephenson and Leila Rupp.21

Both historians present Nazi norms of feminine behavior (for "German"women, of course) as an inconsistent mixture of tradition and modernity.Stephenson cites the conflict between official glorification of domesticityand the advancement of women in many professions.22 The regime's lackof success in mobilizing women for wartime industrial work is inter-preted by Rupp as a sign that many women responded skeptically to theregime's propaganda.23 Both authors, though stressing the involvement ofmany women in Nazi organizations, portray women in general as moredistant than their male compatriots from the regime. Neither author spe-cifically addresses the responsibility of women, as a group or individually,for the Holocaust.

Many of the first German works of feminist scholarship, dating fromthe 1980s, presented women chiefly as victims of the regime rather thanactive participants in it. Historians such as Renate Wiggershaus, Annette

21. Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (New York, 1975); Leila Rupp, MobilizingWomen for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, 1978).

22. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 185-99.23. Rupp, Mobilizing Women, 167-81.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



Kuhn, and Valentine Rothe tended to see in the Nazi period chieflyanother example of the oppression of women throughout history. Theregime, they asserted, excluded women from professional opportunities,burdened them with unwanted pregnancy, consigned them to domesticservitude, and sought in all ways to reverse the achievements of femi-nism.24 "With National Socialism, for the first time a regime made thegendered division of labor into a major aspect of its power base," statesan article in a feminist reference work published during this era, whichmakes no mention of women's role as perpetrators of genocide.25 Someof these works acknowledge and discuss the involvement of some womenin National Socialism, as political functionaries, wives of Nazi officials,workers, or concentration-camp guards. But sometimes even the mostobviously guilty perpetrators appear partly as victims. "These skimpy factsabout her life," Renate Wiggershaus writes of the concentration-guardHildegard Lachert,

suggest to us why Hildegard Lachert turned into "bloody Brygida."Certainly, as an illegitimate child, she was unloved; certainly she wasunder stress when she became pregnant at eighteen. And certainly neitherin the BDM nor in the National Socialist women's organization didshe gain the kind of human friendship, recognition, even love that shewould have needed for her life. . . . Did Hildegard Lachert try to relieveher own misfortune, her own pitiful, shabby existence by bringing un-happiness to others, hating them, and making their life not worth living?26

Soon other feminist historians of the 1980s, while still accepting thesame basic identification of Nazism with reactionary domestic ideology,vigorously disputed this picture of women as passive dupes or victims. Inher widely-cited book, Mothers in the Fatherland, Claudia Koonz claimsthat the regime's policies, which according to her glorified motherhoodand gender difference, did not oppress but rather empowered "German"women by making them privileged members of the racial community.She argues against the conventional identification (also advanced byHorkheimer) of motherly love with humanitarian values, claiming that

24. Renate Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationatsozialismus, (Wuppertal, 1984), 152. Otherexamples of early historiography are: Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschenFaschismus, 2 vols. (Diisseldorf, 1984); Rita Thalmann, Etre femme dans le troisiime Reich(Paris, 1981). A full summary and discussion of this literature is: Dagmar Reese and CarolaSachsse, "Frauenforschung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz," in Tochter Fragen: NSFrauengeschichte, ed. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg im Breisgau,1990), 73-106.

25. Brigitte Bruns, "Nationalsozialismus," in Frauen-Handlexicon: Stichworte zurSelbstbestimmung, ed. Johanna Beyer, Franziska Lamott, and Birgit Meyer (Munich, 1982),203-8.

26. Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus, 103.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



German mothers affirmed the racial superiority of their own offspring andthus "made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns that theyemphasized as motherly."27 Though she condemns Nazi stereotypes ofgender difference and maternal nature as reactionary, Koonz finds manyelements of modernity in the position and behavior of German women.For instance, she implicates the German feminist movements of the Weimarperiod, many of which supported some version of "separate spheres" ide-ology and advocated welfare measures for mothers, in preparing the wayfor National Socialism. Koonz sees the home as a site of collaborationrather than of potential resistance. The separation of the private from thepublic sphere, she charges, made the family a refuge for male perpetra-tors, who could find solace and the illusion of their own normality in anatmosphere of "ersatz goodness."28 Despite the fact that only a small numberof women were directly involved, Koonz attributes to "German" womenas a group a central role in genocide; "motherly love in its separate sphere,far from immunizing women against evil, fired women's dedication tothe Fiihrer's vision of an 'Aryan' future."29

A very different view of the relationship of Nazi ideology and tradi-tional domesticity has been advanced in the many works of the historianGisela Bock. Bock's pioneering book on compulsory sterilization, pub-lished in 1986, denies that National Socialism truly favored domesticity,motherhood, or traditional doctrines of gender difference. Instead, Bockargues that the National Socialist state was distinguished from other con-temporary societies less by its pronatalism (which resembled that of othercountries) than by its antinatalism, realized through policies such as com-pulsory sterilization and eugenic abortion. Although in principle also similarto those of other states, these policies were in practice carried out withunparalleled energy and ruthlessness.30 Bock thus vigorously denies thatNational Socialism encouraged or honored motherhood.31 Neither, sheargues, did the Nazis stress traditional femininity or gender difference inother areas of life. Bock points out that the percentage of women gain-fully employed in Germany was similar to the percentage in other West-ern countries, and that most of the regime's initial attempts to denyeducational and employment opportunity to women were progressively

27. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (NewYork, 1987), 5.

28. Ibid., 420.29. Ibid., 14.30. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nazionalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und

Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986), 461-64.31. But for an opposing opinion see Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bour-

geois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart MacKinnon-Evans (Oxford, Hamburg,New York, 1988), 236-38; Frevert emphasizes the importance of pronatalist measures.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



abandoned as the mobilization of men created the necessity for a skilledfemale labor force. Women's childbearing patterns resembled those of otherWestern societies, and prohibitions against abortion (until wartime) werenot more severe than those elsewhere.32

Rejecting earlier identifications of Nazism with a reactionary and do-mestic view of womanhood, Bock thus claims that the regime encour-aged certain aspects of modernization. From the labor-force status of modernwomen workers, integrated but unequal, she derives their responsibilityfor genocide. Women killers, such as concentration-camp guards, socialworkers, physicians, and others were working women, lured into male-dominated organizations through the promise of high wages and aspiringto imitate men. For Bock, female guilt (in this and presumably in othercases) lay in women's entry into the public, male sphere.33 Though in-cluding housewives in the collective responsibility of the German nation,Bock insists that the private sphere of motherhood and family life wasrelatively uninvolved in the crimes of the state, and could even become asite of resistance, as when women defended themselves against compul-sory sterilization by invoking the importance of motherhood and nurturein their lives.34

Despite their differences, both Bock and Koonz share the assumption(also shared by the Frankfurt School) that private and public spheres, andfemale and male roles, were separate and different. But this assumptiontoo has been called into question by the research of the 1990s.35 Forexample, Gabriele Czarnowski investigates Nazi family policies, showingthe extent to which the regime (far from affirming separate spheres) brokedown public-private boundaries and instrumentalized the family in theservice of political norms of productivity, racial selection, and ideologicalconformity. In her analysis of the penetration of the family by the state,Czarnowski builds on the insights of the Frankfurt School, but whereasthe Frankfurt theorists emphasized the role of the father in promotingauthoritarian values, Czarnowski focuses on female mothering and domestic

32. Gisela Bock, "Gleichheit und Differenz in der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik,"Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 279-81.

33. Ibid., 309-10. For a view of women's roles in administering euthanasia, see HenryFriedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (ChapelHill, 1995), 231-32.

34. Gisela Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buchvon Claudia Koonz," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 569. For Koonz's response tothis review see Claudia Koonz, "Erwiderung auf Gisela Bocks Rezension von 'Mothers inthe Fatherland'," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8 (1992): 394-99.

35. For a very useful summary of recent literature on women and National Socialismsee Adelheid von Saldern, "Victims or Perpetrators? Controversies about the Role of Womenin the Nazi State," reprinted in Nazism and German Society: 1933-1945, ed. David Crew(London and New York, 1994), 141-65; see also Reese and Sachsse, "Frauenforschung."



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



activities.36 Newer studies also avoid global statements about the status of"women," or of "German" women, and focus on specific groups.

The results of this research in general confirm Bock's assertion thatNazi ideas of female behavior were in many ways modern, at least in thesense that girls and women were integrated into some previously male-stereotyped activities and rituals. Research on women's work in the SSand as concentration-camp guards shows the eagerness with which somewomen accepted official norms of toughness.37 Dagmar Reese's study ofgirls in the BDM describes a comradely, athletic, and male-imitative ratherthan a conservatively domestic ideal of female behavior.38 Likewise, arecent article by Elizabeth H. Tobin and Jennifer Gibson concludes thatmany young women of this era were much less impressed by the officialglorification of motherhood and domesticity than by the possibilities forprofessional and career development offered by the regime. These findings,based on women's memories as recorded through oral history, challengeLeila Rupp's conclusion that German women took a skeptical view ofthe regime's propaganda. Tobin and Gibson demonstrate that some womenwere uncomplaining and even enthusiastic participants in the compulsoryyear of service required by the regime and in war-related work.39

The newest research, therefore, tends to debunk the generalization (putforward by the historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermannamong others)40 that Nazi policy toward women can be summed up bythe cliche of "Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche," and shows that women, too, par-ticipated in the culture of instrumental rationality. But their participationdid not make that culture less male-dominated.41 The fact that certaincareer opportunities were open to women under National Socialism (in

36. Gabriele Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar: Ehe und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus(Weinheim, 1989).

37. See for example Claus Fiillberg-Stolberg, Martina Jung, Renate Riebe, MartinaScheitenberger, eds., Frauen in Konzentrationslagem: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbriick (Bremen, 1994).See also Gudrun Schwarz, "Verdrangte Taterinnen: Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939—1945),"in Nach Osten, ed. Theresa Wobbe (Frankfurt, 1992), 197-227. An early and still veryuseful article is Sybil Milton, "Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and Ger-man-Jewish Women," in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Ger-many, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan (New York, 1984);reprinted in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust(New York, 1993), 213-49.

38. Dagmar Reese, Straff aber nicht stramm, herb, aber nicht derb: Zur Vergesellschaftung vonMadchen dutch den Bund deutscher Madel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim,1989).

39. Elizabeth H. Tobin and Jennifer Gibson, "The Meanings of Labor: East GermanWomen's Work in the Transition from Nazism to Communism," Central European History28, no. 3 (1995): 301-41.

40. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945(Cambridge, 1991), 242.

41. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 207.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



many ways similar to those available to women in other Western socie-ties), and that women took advantage of these opportunities, has led somehistorians to assert or to imply that the regime actually supported feministaspirations. To cite only one example, Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim pref-ace a short section on the participation of female researchers in Naziracial science with the snide heading, "Emancipation."42 But here wemust make the important distinction between normative and instrumentalrationality. Advancement in careers does not necessarily fulfill the norma-tive goal of feminism, the equal power and value of women and men inall areas of life. In this case, women's energy and ambition was instru-mentalized in the service of one of the most brutally male-supremacistregimes ever known to history. The regime suppressed all feminist organiza-tions and, although sponsoring large party-affiliated women's organizations,gave them no role in important policy decisions. The subordination ofwomen in politics and in public institutional structures was expressly in-tended to discredit the values that the Nazis stereotyped as feminine. Anexcellent example is provided by Doris Bergen, who describes the effortsof the Nazi-identified "German Christian" movement both to reduce theactual power of women in the church and to create a "manly" Christian-ity free of traditional Christian values of compassion and concern forindividuals.43

The Nazis' destruction of feminist movements was of course only oneaspect of their broader effort to destroy all forms of difference, whetherpolitical, cultural, or "racial." The suppression of democracy and enforce-ment of conformity was a necessary, though of course not a sufficient,precondition for the horrors of war and genocide that followed. Thishistory of suppression is overlooked by both Bauman and Horkheimer,whose sweeping and undifferentiated indictment of Western culture impliesthat the subservience of Western intellectuals to the claims of the totali-tarian state was universal and unquestioned. In fact, the Western traditionhas included many alternative and dissenting voices, those of feministsamong a multitude of others. It is curious that Bauman, so critical of theuniversalizing tendencies of Western thought, does not himself attend tothe many voices—including in this case those of religious dissenters, socialistand labor movements, and many artists and writers as well as feminists—that must be silenced in order to make reason subservient to power.

Because they do not acknowledge the importance of dissent within thetradition of Western rationality, theorists such as Horkheimer and Bauman

42. Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vemichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschenPlane fur eine neue europaische Ordnung (Frankfurt, 1995), 198.

43. Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christians in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill,1996).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



can envisage no basis for change. Horkheimer, who looks toward therecovery of the normative reason of the Enlightenment as "the redemp-tion of the hopes of the past,"44 has no clear view of the means to thisend, nor even of the end itself.45 Bauman, who does not acknowledgeeven the potential for a critical reason, is left floundering in his ownuncertainty. As we have seen, he turns to Levinas for a postmodern alter-native to the malady that he defines as distinctively modern, the tendencyto claim universal validity for philosophical and pohtical systems that overrideand annihilate the individual. Along with Levinas, Bauman insists that theface-to-face proximity to the Other, and the resulting respect for theOther's unique individuality, are the sources of a morality of which indi-vidual responsibility and caring are the transcendental values. But he canexplain neither why this ethic of empathy has been disempowered inWestern culture, nor what forms of social change would be needed inorder to empower it.

By failing to recognize how all such ethical values are and have beenshaped by cultural constructions of gender, Bauman omits an essentialhistorical dimension of his argument. Certainly one important historicalprecondition for what Bauman characterizes as "the great divide whichwas to become the trademark of modern living . . . between reason andemotion"46 was the separation of spheres that identified the former witha masculine and public sphere, and the latter with a feminized and privatesphere. And one reason for the disempowerment of the ethical values ofcaring, empathy, and face-to-face intimacy in Western culture has beenthe subordination of the women to whom such values have been cultur-ally attributed.

The relationship of gender relations to ethics has been extensively ex-plored by feminist theorists such as the psychologist Carol Gilligan, whomBauman fails even to cite. In her controversial and much-discussed book,In a Different Voice, Gilligan identifies a characteristically female "ethic ofcare." Women, she demonstrates, typically derive their ethical decisionsless than men from impersonal and rule-oriented criteria, and more froma flexible awareness of the possible consequences of any given decisionfor the other human beings affected. Gilligan and other feminist theorists,though they have often been accused of biological essentialism, do notattribute this ethical outlook to female biology. Rather, they argue thatthe status of women as "different" or "other," as outsiders to male-supremacistpower structures, provides them with a standpoint from which to perceive

44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xv.45. Cf. Rumpf, "Mystical Aura," 311.46. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford, 1995),

258.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



the highly unjust consequences that often result from conventional con-ceptions of justice. Unlike Horkheimer and Bauman, feminist theorists donot identify this "different" ethical consciousness with a presocial or im-mature phase of human development, with fantasies about the "paradiseof childhood," or with a private sphere separated from public and politi-cal concerns. They assert that it is fully as valid and empowering as thedominant model.47

Building upon Gilligan's basic insights, many feminist theorists such asSeyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young have shown how conventionalWestern conceptions of justice, which place abstract rationality above humanconcern, have perpetuated male supremacy in the guise of universal rea-son. These theorists do not self-righteously proclaim the moral superior-ity of conventionally "female" values. Rather, they search for an approachto ethics that combines concerns for justice and for care.48 "Theoretically,the distinction between justice and care cuts across the familiar divisionsbetween thinking and feeling, egoism and altruism, theoretical and prac-tical reasoning," Gilligan writes. "Since everyone is vulnerable both tooppression and to abandonment, two moral visions—one of justice, oneof care—recur in human experience. The moral injunctions, not to actunfairly toward others, and not to turn away from someone in need,captures these different concerns."49

By pointing to the importance of feminist theory to our understandingof the ethical issues raised by Bauman's meditation of the Holocaust, I donot imply that this or any other contemporary theoretical project canprovide facile answers to the most difficult and intractable questions raisedby recent history. However, the development of feminist theory itself canshed light on one of Bauman's central concerns, the origin of critical ornormative reason. For, as the history of the Enlightenment suggests, criti-cal reason does not arise from disinterested intellectual speculation, butfrom the concrete historical situation of persons and groups who are ex-cluded from power and are thus in a position both to perceive and tounmask the dominant ideology that upholds it. The Other of Bauman's

47. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development(Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Seyla Benhabib, "The Debate over Women and Moral TheoryRevisited," in Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas, 231-46.

48. Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-GilliganControversy and Feminist Theory," in Feminism as Critique, ed. Benhabib and Cornell, 77-96;Iris Marion Young, "Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Moral andPolitical Theory," in Feminism as Critique, 56-76; and Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self:Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York, 1992).

49. Carol Gilligan, "Moral Orientation and Moral Development," in E. F. Kittay andDiane T. Myers, Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, 1987), 20. Quoted in Seyla Benhabib,"The Debate over Moral Theory Revisited," 191-92.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



and Levinas's discourse becomes at certain historical moments not simplyan accusing presence, but a challenging voice. Among such dissenters,feminists of our own time have played a major role in developing justthat critique of the relationship of knowledge to power that has been soimportant recently to Holocaust studies as well as to other areas of inquiry.

In the investigation of the connections between the construction ofgender and the cultural preconditions for the Holocaust, certain direc-tions of inquiry will be important in the future. Nazi constructions ofmasculinity—which by contrast to corresponding constructions of femi-ninity have received little attention—require more systematic examina-tion. As Adelheid von Saldern sensibly remarks, the investigation of normsof both male and female behavior as practiced by specific groups of per-petrators and bystanders will give a more differentiated picture of genderconstruction as it shaped, and was shaped by, Nazi society.50 An impor-tant step in that direction is Doris Bergen's study of the German Chris-tian Church, which examines how Nazi norms of masculinity and femininityinfluenced this group's religious ideas and practice.51 The comparativeperspective is also important. Most of the social, economic, and culturalroles allotted to women in Nazi Germany were not distinctive to thatsociety, but were similar to those held by women in other contemporaryWestern societies, whose rates of gainful employment, child-bearing, andinvolvement in state bureaucracies were similar to those of their Germancounterparts. How, then, can we make the involvement of women in thestate's "culture of instrumental rationality" a cause of the Holocaust, ac-knowledged to be a unique event? For that matter, can we really say thatthe spirit of technological rationality and bureaucratic efficiency was somuch more prevalent among German than among other Western men asto account, as Bauman implies, for the singularly German development ofNational Socialism? If the Enlightenment did, indeed, furnish the intel-lectual preconditions for fascism and genocide, then why did the Westerncultures which were much more deeply influenced by the Enlightenmentthan Germany—such as France or the United States—produce no similarphenomena?52 The early example of comparative history created by LeilaRupp's study of the mobilization of American and German women dur-ing the Second World War provides a precedent for future cross-culturalstudies of both male and female activities.53

In conclusion, I will return to Bauman's central focus: the split in theWestern psyche between instrumental and normative rationality. Bauman

50. von Saldern, "Victims or Perpetrators?"51. Bergen, Twisted Cross.52. I thank Kenneth Barkin for suggesting this question.53. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473



implies that only the erasure of these boundaries, resulting in the integra-tion of technological and bureaucratic efficiency with human responsibil-ity, will create a new ethical consciousness. I would suggest that onemeans to this end would surely be the integration of the male and femalespheres, so that men cannot escape the responsibility of human caring,nor women the responsibility of public decision-making and action. Thishope seems to me not to be in conflict with the heritage of the Enlight-enment, but on the contrary, to continue the tradition originated by MaryWollstonecraft, Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, the Marquis de Condorcet, andmany others. "Women I allow may have different duties to fulfil," wroteWollstonecraft in 1792, "but they are human duties, and the principlesthat should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must bethe same."54

UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

54. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston(New York, 1988), 51.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900014473


Documents

The Holocaust and the Modernization of Gender: A ...€¦ · otherwise identified, are to women of the elite, or "German" ethni2 c group. 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity Holocaust and